How do licenses work? Do I need a license for every machine that renders from Massive?
Massive is sold as a floating license. Massive can be run on any machine in your network, but the number of licenses you own is the maximum number of machines that can be running Massive at once. The number of processors running on that machine do not affect the count.
The renderer plugins (massive.so, run_program.exe, massive_mray.so etc.) do not require a license to run, so if you are doing software rendering on a render farm, you would not need additional Massive licenses on the rendering machines.
Which video cards do you recommend?
Nvidia graphics cards are recommended, for more information click here
How many agents can Massive simulate at once?
Massive can produce a simulation of as many agents as are required. On a typical workstation PC, millions can be run in one pass, depending on the complexity of the agents and available RAM. Although sometimes it's sometimes better to break the scene into layers of say 10,000 or 100,000 agents for practicality.
How close can Massive agents be to the camera? Is Massive only good for distant shots?
Massive is useful for any kind of agents from simple boxes to hero level characters, and has often been used for hero level characters in films. Massive agents can use blend shapes for detailed facial animation. Ready-to-Run agents come supplied with geometry that is suitable for viewing from a moderate distance, and their geometry can easily be replaced with higher resolution geometry by the user if the camera needs to move closer to them. Due to Massive's unique geometry-independent skinning algorithm, swapping in higher resolution geometry takes only seconds.
What are the machine requirements to run Massive?
The hardware requirements for Massive are surprisingly modest. Massive is extremely efficient and does not require Massive resources. For more information about system requirements please
click here
How does Massive work with other 3D packages?
Massive Prime and Massive Jet are standalone programs, but can import and export files from other 3D packages using various file formats such as FBX, Maya Ascii and USD. Skeletons, animation, geometry, animated lights, animated cameras can all be imported via FBX and Maya Ascii. Geometry can also be imported and exported using the industry standard Wavefront .obj format. Simulations can be exported to USD.
Massive for Maya runs entirely inside of Maya, and so provides a very easy transition for artists familiar with Maya. The Massive proprietary render plugins work seamlessly with rendering from inside Maya.
Massive provides plugins for major renderers suach as Arnold, RenderMan and V-Ray, which allow for efficient rendering and simple integration into studio render pipelines.
How do I render from Massive? Does it work with ______ renderer?
Massive provides plugins for major renderers suach as Arnold, RenderMan and V-Ray, which allow for efficient rendering and simple integration into studio render pipelines. Massive also has it's own GPU accelerated renderer called Velocity. It's also possible to render Massive simulations via USD.
How can I learn to use Massive?
There are many schools around the world teaching Massive. To see a list of some of them click here
If you want to learn online you can go to the FX Phd website here
